"Oh, 'twould be marvelous if the world and its moral questions were like some game board, with plain black players and white, and fixed rules, and nary a shade of grey."The Black Company. Shadows Linger.

Fixed: "Have a skill maxed at 300, for example, swords. Equip a sword that give a bonus, like a gladius, and it will allow you to "add" points to the skill (but in reality those points are wasted, since the skill stays at 300). It shouldn't allow you to do that."

What is the intended behaviour here? I'd have thought that it makes sense to have the bonus remain meaningful - i.e. effectively give an over-300 skill value. Just because you have the natural skill value capped at 300, doesn't mean it makes sense to cap the adjusted skill value at 300 too - in fact I'd say just the opposite. If you get +10 for a gladius, a 300-skill character ought to have an effective skill of 310; if you add +10%, he should have an effective skill of 330. Limiting everything to 300 both fails to make sense, and is probably less interesting - since there's no longer the usual balancing trade-off in using a lighter weapon.

Of course it's right to fix a bug where the character sheet is misinforming the player. I just think the character sheet had it right in this case - the game system ought to be changed so that adjusted skill values can be over 300. I can't see any downside to doing this.

Fixed: "Have a skill maxed at 300, for example, swords. Equip a sword that give a bonus, like a gladius, and it will allow you to "add" points to the skill (but in reality those points are wasted, since the skill stays at 300). It shouldn't allow you to do that."

What is the intended behaviour here? I'd have thought that it makes sense to have the bonus remain meaningful - i.e. effectively give an over-300 skill value. Just because you have the natural skill value capped at 300, doesn't mean it makes sense to cap the adjusted skill value at 300 too - in fact I'd say just the opposite. If you get +10 for a gladius, a 300-skill character ought to have an effective skill of 310; if you add +10%, he should have an effective skill of 330. Limiting everything to 300 both fails to make sense, and is probably less interesting - since there's no longer the usual balancing trade-off in using a lighter weapon.

Of course it's right to fix a bug where the character sheet is misinforming the player. I just think the character sheet had it right in this case - the game system ought to be changed so that adjusted skill values can be over 300. I can't see any downside to doing this.

I'm fairly certain that he was saying that they only fixed the bug allowing players to add points to an over-capped skill, not that they removed the ability for bonuses to push you up to 305 or 310 or whatever. The "stays at 300" part meant skill pre-equipment bonus, not post-bonus.

Logged

"Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his very, very best he is a sort of low grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time he is a sarcasm." - Samuel L. Clemens

The skill was always capped at 300, with bonuses or not. The problem was that if you had 300 natural + some bonus, you could keep pumping SPs into it, but it didn't give any effect.

Logged

"Oh, 'twould be marvelous if the world and its moral questions were like some game board, with plain black players and white, and fixed rules, and nary a shade of grey."The Black Company. Shadows Linger.

"Oh, 'twould be marvelous if the world and its moral questions were like some game board, with plain black players and white, and fixed rules, and nary a shade of grey."The Black Company. Shadows Linger.

Ok. So (do excuse me if I'm being slow), does that mean that a 300-skill character doesn't get an advantage from using a +10 skill weapon? This bug aside, isn't that silly?

He does get the advantage if there's also a penalty to attack. I'm not to keen on stats/attributes going over the max, though. You can't have more than 10 in attribute, and you can't get over 300 in a stat. It's the limit of the humanly possible. But let me hear your arguments.

Logged

"Hasta la victoria, siempre."

"Who has time? But then if we do not ever take time, how can we ever have it?"

The argument is simply that he isn't going over 300 in the stat: using a gladius doesn't mean he's any more skilled with a sword, only that he gets a +10 in all checks of that skill. That might be functionally equivalent, but it has a clearly different meaning. This isn't a magical gladius that's giving him supernatural abilities - it's simply a sword that's easier to use, so he gets better results in situations where the skill gets used.

Really it doesn't make a great deal of sense to put the weapon bonus on the character sheet in the first place: a character with 100 sword skill using a gladius, still has 100 sword skill. The reaction against having the skill go over 300, comes out of treating the character-sheet value as the character's natural ability. If that's the case, it shouldn't be adjusted according to the weapon he carries. If the character sheet isn't representing natural ability, but rather how-effective-this-character-is-at-sword-skill-checks, then there's no reason not to have it go over 300: a character using an easier sword should have an advantage when he has 300 skill, just as he does against an inferior opponent; an over-300-skill in this case isn't saying anything about the character's natural ability - simply that he's got 300 skill, and an easy-to-use sword.

The same kind of argument also applies to the stat case, but there it's less clear, since you can come up with some magicy/techy reason why some weird armour can't increase very high abilities to super-human levels. With a gladius, there's no hope of a convincing argument to that effect. A gladius doesn't increase sword skill, it just makes the sword skill a character has go further. Having it arbitrarily stop doing this at skill 300 is just nonsense.

Naturally it's not a huge issue either way, but I don't see any argument for the way things are now. A character shouldn't get over 300 in a stat - fine: he's not; he's getting an contextual bonus on a stat roll, just as he might for reduced-range / reduced-opponent-defence / opponent-being-knocked-out / opponent-being-bolaed etc. etc.. Holding a gladius has nothing to do with his natural sword skill.

There's just no way you can rationalize that without appealing to magic.

Of course there's no need to rationalize it if there's some good gameplay-based argument for capping everything at 300, regardless of whether it makes sense. I don't see such an argument. In fact, I think it makes things worse gameplay-wise: if the +10 was helpful to balance through 100, 200 and 250 skill, it's almost certainly helpful to balance at 300 skill. Eliminating the +10 for a weapon once skill hits 300 is only likely to throw balance off, and make choices less interesting.

[[of course it should be noted here that the recent THC changes have made a flat point bonus to skill, progressively less important for increasing skill values; perhaps that's good, perhaps not; but whether a gladius provides +10, +10%, or something different, having its effect magically disappear at 290-->300, is nonsense - and probably unhelpful to gameplay, if anything]]

+10 for gladius means simply that the sword is easier to wield than larger swords. One can argue that at some a swordsman reaches the level of mastery where he can wield all swords equally easy and with great precision, no longer getting any benefits from wielding a smaller weapon.

Sure, but that argument still looks pretty silly when the impact doesn't reduce at all from 30 to 290, then suddenly disappears. Again, I find the argument incongruous, but I also don't see any gameplay-based reason to prefer limiting adjusted-skill to 300. The +10 makes weapon choice more interesting; removing it makes things a bit less interesting. The current situation also creates an odd incentive for a gladius-user not to bother mastering the skill - since he's already effectively mastered it by using a gladius.

The only advantage I can see to keeping things as they are is the idea that a 300 limit is somehow neater, but I'd disagree with that too: the weirdness of disappearing-gladius-bonus just draws attention to an odd situation, and creates counter-intuitive incentives - e.g. for a gladius-user to stop increasing skill at 290. To me, this makes achieving the 300 limit less special, since reaching the limit doesn't mean you've mastered the skill - it means you've either mastered it, or you've almost mastered it, picked up a gladius, and realized you had nothing more to learn (until you put the gladius down).

"Higher-skill-improves-performance-with-the-skill" is a very simple and intuitive rule for players to understand and apply. Needlessly screwing with it at the almost-300-skill end of things seems silly. There's nothing wrong with limiting natural skill to 300 - the limits-of-human-possibility reasoning works well there, and makes perfect sense. Arbitrarily limiting the combination of the context, and the skill, makes no sense.Removing the bonus for a gladius at 300 is as silly as removing the bonus for a fast attack (which I hope doesn't happen??).

Again, I don't see any reason to list weapon-based skill adjustments on the character sheet. It'd be fine just to have unadjusted skill listed, and for the player to know that using certain weapons gives him bonuses on skill checks with the related skill. It's not as though the skill impact on THC is straight-forward anymore, so knowing the adjusted skill value for a given check isn't particularly relevant.To me it'd make sense if the weapon-bonus didn't count towards passive traits anyway (though that's arguable, of course). That's the only way I can see that listing the adjusted value even helps at the moment.

[I remain aware that this has vanishingly little significance either way - I just don't see the upside]

I'm with Galsiah here, the bonus should be applied at max skill, too. If the gladius is a bit easier to use, this shoud apply for a master as well. Makes equipment choice more interesting.

I'm with it either way, though, the only way I don't like is not showing the bonus in the character screen (once it goes past max value), but still applying it in the to hit calculations. Some games have this.

Just what is so great and serious about videogames that videogame journalists should be fighters for truth, rather than purely promotional devices for a niche hobby (which is what they were meant to be).?